SpoutBlog is sitting out this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, but that doesn’t mean we’re not paying attention to the geek mecca from afar. In a way, we get to have a more sane perspective without all the screaming and crowdedness (between Twilight and Johnny Depp, it’s apparently madness). Plus, we’re checking out all of the direct coverage, and I do believe we’re getting a more comprehensive experience this way.

I’ve selected some of my favorite coverage from the last 24 hours so that you may share in the appreciation as a fellow outsider (or maybe you’re there and want to see what others have seen/heard). Check out all the best comments, videos and links after the jump:

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Should special effects only be used to service a film’s story, or is it perfectly fine for movies to feature extraneous spectacle? That’s a debate that comes up often among cineastes, but ultimately there’s room for both functions. Sometimes, in cases like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, both categories of effects may even faultlessly coexist in the same film. Yet there is one kind of effects employment that’s intolerable to all film-loving parties: the gratuitous exploitation for the sole purpose of brazen gimmickry. It’s this kind of effects work that goes beyond spectacle. It’s not so much a show as a show off.

For one example of this cinematic sin check out Karina’s review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she references a scene featuring an inessential and irrelevant rocket launch in the background of an otherwise intimate moment between two lovers on a sailboat. Actually, that’s apparently only a minor citation in a “a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.” Hardly the first movie to commit such a crime, sure, but Benjamin Button seems to be the most thoroughly guilty exploiter since Forrest Gump (both films, incidentally, were scripted by Eric Roth).

So, in (dis)honor of Roth’s repeat offense, let’s take a short look at the worst exploitations of special effects in the last 15 years:
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The fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition.

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• Clint Eastwood will direct a Peter Morgan-scripted supernatural thriller titled Hereafter, which has been likened to The Sixth Sense. But with Steven Spielberg producing, wouldn’t it be better to make comparisons to Poltergeist, Always or even Casper (in which Eastwood appears)? Or is the plot more concerned with a lame twist than it is with ghosts?
• Meanwhile Spielberg’s directorial replacement on The Trial of the Chicago 7 might be Ben Stiller?
• The children’s book adaptation Measle and the Wrathmonk sounds like Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets parts of Beetlejuice, which could be good except that it’s going to be yet another creepy motion-capture animation from producer Robert Zemeckis.
• Anticipating huge numbers for Twilight, Summit has gone ahead and assigned adaptations of the second and third books (New Moon and Eclipse) to Melissa Rosenberg, who also wrote the first installment.
• Now that Hope is upon us, does DreamWorks really need to make a fearful terrorist-attacks-the-president movie like Motorcade?
• And now that he’s made a disappointing 007 film, will Marc Forster also ruin the popular zombie novel World War Z?
• Speaking of that new 007 installment, Quantum of Solace is expected to have the biggest opening for a Bond film ever.

Look, I’m on the record: the first two Back to the Future films are my favorite blockbuster-and-sequel set of all time. And as maybe the most powerful cinematic treatment of the conflict between nostalgia (romance) and the true weight of history (responsibility) to come along since the dawn of the blockbuster era, it’s a no brainer that those of us who have seen it so many times that we could sing it like a song would look for new opportunities to wallow in our fandom. But somebody’s got to start imposing limits. Behold the following:

Exhibit A: That Donnie Darko sequel that everyone’s mad about? One of its stars indicated to MTV News (via Indie Eye) that it’s actually more like a remake of Back to the Future 2. “It goes into all different dimensions, but it’s really about turning something around for somebody else, and being able to go back and have another chance…We just come back [in time] and change what happened in the first one.”

…and the far more egregious Exhibit B: Whitney at Pop Candy alerts us to the news that ThinkGeek.com is selling a non-functional yet “movie accurate” replica of the Flux Capictor––for $249. In the movies, the Flux Capacitor is the plutonium-fueled gadget which makes time travel possible, but in real life, it’s apparently a glorified paperweight which makes shitty sweded Back to the Future remakes like the above possible. This is where normal, healthy nostalgia passes over to the point of capitalism-aided psychosis, and it just makes me sad.

Prompted by a Twitter from Chris Thilk, last week I set out to solve a long-burning conundrum, once and for all: of the two songs Huey Lewis wrote and performed on the Back to the Future soundtrack, which is better: Back in Time, or The Power of Love?

I was so enamored with the first BttF film as a child that I actually owned the soundtrack–on cassette!–but I haven’t listened to either song divorced from the film as an adult. I intended to give this matter the utmost serious consideration. But then I actually listened to the songs all the way through…and they both pretty much made me want to throw myself in front of the Delorean (the pre-Mr. Fusion, non-flying Delorean). The best analysis I can offer? Time’s awkward shoehorning of references to the movie (”Get back, Marty!”) aside, they’re kind of the same song. Love is, marginally, more enjoyable, if only because it’s blissfully free of Time’s gratuitous saxophone. But that guitar solo … ouch.

I’ve embedded two Back to the Future fan tributes: one set to The Power of Love above, one set to Back in Time below the jump. Watch them if you dare, and if there’s some kind of essential greatness to one or the other that I missed, let me know.

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This past Saturday, former Growing Pains teen idol Kirk Cameron participated in a debate about the existence of God. Now, it’s even less my place than his to comment on either the Christian or the atheist point of view, but the event did make me think of a serious debate that I was once involved in: the existence of Hoverboards. I knew they didn’t exist, but a friend of mine was certain they did. No, he’s not stupid; in his defense it was widely rumored that they had been invented and were to be released in conjunction with Back to the Future II. Apparently the rumor began when Robert Zemeckis joked that the wheel-less skateboards were real — at least that’s what Kirk Cameron says happened, in this clip from “The Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy.” Thanks to Kirk Cameron, I won my debate. I have no idea if he won his own or not. Anyway, this is one of my favorite videos of all time (available in the DVD box set of the trilogy), and I couldn’t resist making it my clip of the day. For my other choice, you can check out this other clip, which like BTTF features Christopher Lloyd, and like the clip I’ve chosen features a former child star, and it shows the reversal of what happens to Amy Adams in this week’s new release, Enchanted, which is unfortunately on my mind today. Aren’t you glad, I chose Kirk Cameron instead?

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I’m actually very excited about Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture drool-fest, Beowulf, coming out tomorrow. I should probably know better. When dialog scenes are replaced with slick CG versions it’s a pretty safe indication that the movie will be little more than eye candy. Nevertheless, I’m dying to see an impossibly ripped Beowulf kick some Grendel ass.

My excitement about the movie has made me feel like a eleven year-old again, which has me thinking about two other passions from my younger years: stop-motion animation and Legos. I haven’t done much to nurture either of those loves in the last decade and a half, so I was unaware that there are a handful of hilarious videos on YouTube featuring stop-motion animated Lego mini-figs playing out scenes from movies. The best one I found was a the well-crafted short above, depicting the opening act of Beowulf, apparently “made for a school project.”

While Zemeckis pours millions into pushing CG animation to the next level, I’m glad there are still kids out there making movie magic in their basements, one frame at a time.

Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.

David Poland thinks it’s an Oscar contender:

It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)

IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:

The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.

The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:

Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.

The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.

In an apparent bid to play every villain that, as a child, I found weirdly sympathetic (after the Grinch and, um, Andy Kaufmann), Jim Carrey will star as Scrooge in a Robert Zemeckis adaptation of The Christmas Carol. Zemeckis, who has spent the past few years mired in his soon-to-be-released motion-capture adaptation of Beowulf, is setting upCarol as another CG/motion-capture/3D stereoscopic extravaganza.

Todd McCarthy assesses Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “Pottermania will reach a peak in July with the nearly simultaneous release of the fifth film and the seventh and final book, and only commercial concern for Warner Bros. may be that, after the second or third week, curiosity about the concluding tome could overshadow interest in the film.”

Is Phil Donahue the next Al Gore? The Man Who Fell To Oprah is shopping around a documentary, which he co-directed, called Body of War, described by Variety as “an unashamedly partisan film arguing the folly of the Iraq campaign.” The pic apparently paints most Democrats as ineffectual yes-men, while trumpeting Senator Robert Byrd as the lone maverick who dared to go against the pack.